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The multi-armed bandit problem forms the foundation for solving a wide range of on-line stochastic optimization problems through a simple, yet effective mechanism. One simply casts the problem as a gambler that repeatedly pulls one out of N…
We study the robust best-arm identification problem (RBAI) in the case of linear rewards. The primary objective is to identify a near-optimal robust arm, which involves selecting arms at every round and assessing their robustness by…
Motivated by emerging applications such as live-streaming e-commerce, promotions and recommendations, we introduce and solve a general class of non-stationary multi-armed bandit problems that have the following two features: (i) the…
We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the…
We study the problem of corralling stochastic bandit algorithms, that is combining multiple bandit algorithms designed for a stochastic environment, with the goal of devising a corralling algorithm that performs almost as well as the best…
We study the problem of stochastic combinatorial pure exploration (CPE), where an agent sequentially pulls a set of single arms (a.k.a. a super arm) and tries to find the best super arm. Among a variety of problem settings of the CPE, we…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, an online algorithm makes a sequence of choices. In each round it chooses from a time-invariant set of alternatives and receives the payoff associated with this alternative. While the case of small…
We study a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, where at each time step, the player observes an independently sampled context that determines the arms' mean rewards. However, playing an arm blocks it (across all contexts) for a…
We study a multi-armed bandit problem with covariates in a setting where there is a possible delay in observing the rewards. Under some mild assumptions on the probability distributions for the delays and using an appropriate randomization…
Recently multi-armed bandit problem arises in many real-life scenarios where arms must be sampled in batches, due to limited time the agent can wait for the feedback. Such applications include biological experimentation and online…
We consider the problem of selecting the best variable-value strategy for solving a given problem in constraint programming. We show that the recent Embarrassingly Parallel Search method (EPS) can be used for this purpose. EPS proposes to…
In this paper, we introduce the notion of replicable policies in the context of stochastic bandits, one of the canonical problems in interactive learning. A policy in the bandit environment is called replicable if it pulls, with high…
The multi-armed bandit(MAB) is a classical sequential decision problem. Most work requires assumptions about the reward distribution (e.g., bounded), while practitioners may have difficulty obtaining information about these distributions to…
Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithms often enjoy optimal regret for adversarial as well as stochastic bandit problems and allow for a streamlined analysis. Nonetheless, FTRL algorithms require the solution of an optimization…
Reinforcement learning addresses the dilemma between exploration to find profitable actions and exploitation to act according to the best observations already made. Bandit problems are one such class of problems in stateless environments…
We study the problem of identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi-armed bandit game. Given a set of $n$ arms indexed from $1$ to $n$, each arm $i$ is associated with an unknown reward distribution supported on $[0,1]$ with mean…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of…
Thompson Sampling is one of the oldest heuristics for multi-armed bandit problems. It is a randomized algorithm based on Bayesian ideas, and has recently generated significant interest after several studies demonstrated it to have better…